> A growing body of legal scholarship argues that large language model (LLM) outputs are not “speech” under the First Amendment and therefore may be regulated without the scrutiny ordinarily applied to restrictions on expression

Isn’t ‘speech’ what happens when one party chooses to share their words with another? If I use chat gpt to generate a sentence, then deliver the sentence to someone else to be read, have I not ‘spoken’ to them? Just because I didn’t write it doesn’t mean it’s not my speech.

> The no-speech position argues that because no person stands behind a model’s words at the moment of generation, those words are not First Amendment-covered “speech.”

No person, except the user who used the tool to generate the content, surely? What the user does with the content they create is up to them - but the tool communicating the result of the work to the user is certainly not ‘speech’ - unless it’s the user ‘speaking’ to themself. The user is the author of the output, effectively. It only becomes ‘speech’ once they choose to make it available to others.

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lovich 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> Just because I didn’t write it doesn’t mean it’s not my speech.

Bruh.

Yea it does.

You’re throwing prompts into a non deterministic text generator. You explicitly are not making the speech.

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tpmoney 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If the EFF gives you a template email to send to your congress-critter to opposed some terrible spyware bill, isn’t that your “speech” for the purposes of the 1st amendment? It doesn’t matter that you personally didn’t pen the words, only that (as the political ads say) “[you are] lovich and [you] approve this message”.

Why would LLM output be any different?

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iAMkenough 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is copying and pasting someone else’s words and publishing it on your website or personal profile not First Amendment protected speech?

	▲	lovich 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You’re quoting someone else’s speech. The quotation is your speech, but the literal words were not. I’m actually fine with the idea that people are quoting LLMs but there’s this conflation I find many people where they treat the LLMs output as their own literal thoughts. The language around this distinction is clunky currently so if you meant the former point I agree, but I had interpreted the comment I was responding to as the latter.

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garkotipankaj 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

if someone asks their assistant to send you an email on their behalf, whose speech was it?

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garkotipankaj 12 hours ago | parent [-]

btw "non-deterministic text generator" also describes humans perfectly. if it didn't you'd be less stupid.

	▲	lovich 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> if it didn't you'd be less stupid. Hey, fuck you too buddy. And if you, as an executive with an assistant, asked the assistant to draft the speech and they added in something that got you in hot water later, I’d fully expect you as the executive to claim it was the assistants speech and in no way represented you or your firm.